DelPen wrote:What happened to Colorado? Was it simply all the liberals who didn't like the tax rates in California pack up and leave and bring their sense of government to Denver and Boulder?

I think that’s a lot of it, yes. I mentioned yesterday in the PDT that I recently heard a new term: Califorming. A play on the word terraforming, Califorming is when people flee the high taxes, incompetent government, etc. of California and move to free states, but then vote for the same sort of politicians and demand the same progressive junk that ruined California in the first place. I saw that term on a blog where Coloradan gun owners were complaining that a lot of the people who are supporting this round of gun control aren’t originally from Colorado. Yeah, guess where many of them are originally from.

tifosi77 wrote:Magpul probably does a couple hundred million a year in revenue, yes?

Easily, especially in this market climate.

I believe I saw on one of the gun blogs I read that when asked at the SHOT show, reps from Magpul said that they’d received orders for more than a year’s worth of production in approximately the month or so following Sandy Hook. So long as demand stays this high, that company basically has a license to print money. Good for them.

Digitalgypsy66 wrote:SC Senate just passed the first provisions of an open carry law, so come on down!!!!

Somehow I don't' see this passing.

I’m not up on SC politics, but a southern state with a 60-40 majority of Republicans in both houses and a Republican governor strikes me as a likely candidate for passing this bill. Open carry is legal in most states, including Pennsylvania. I’ve never done it, but I could if I wanted to.

tifosi77 wrote:Magpul probably does a couple hundred million a year in revenue, yes?

Easily, especially in this market climate.

I believe I saw on one of the gun blogs I read that when asked at the SHOT show, reps from Magpul said that they’d received orders for more than a year’s worth of production in approximately the month or so following Sandy Hook. So long as demand stays this high, that company basically has a license to print money. Good for them.

What I think is interesting in that is the demand for both guns themselves and their accessories is largely coming from a relatively small - and shrinking - population of existing gun owners, not new buyers flocking to gun stores. The rate of gun ownership in this country has gone down from 50% to just over 30% in about thirty years. But the number of guns in private circulation is higher than it's ever been. So it's people buying multiple firearms as opposed to a lot more people only owning one weapon. Hoarding might be one way to describe it.

DelPen wrote:

tifosi77 wrote:I read online that they had an infusion of investment capital a couple years ago from some group in North Carolina...........

Could be Freedom Group, their headquarters is in NC.

Just looked it up..... Triangle Capital Corporation, and their investment was a combination of debt assumption and equity.

tifosi77 wrote:What I think is interesting in that is the demand for both guns themselves and their accessories is largely coming from a relatively small - and shrinking - population of existing gun owners, not new buyers flocking to gun stores. The rate of gun ownership in this country has gone down from 50% to just over 30% in about thirty years. But the number of guns in private circulation is higher than it's ever been. So it's people buying multiple firearms as opposed to a lot more people only owning one weapon. Hoarding might be one way to describe it.

I am not sure about the rate of gun ownership being down by that much. That number comes from a long-running private annual survey that asks people if anyone in their household owns guns. Thus, it’s not measuring guns/people, it’s measuring gun owners/households. That number could be affected by many factors, some of which I discussed in the PDT at this post: viewtopic.php?f=5&t=38742&p=2260507&hilit=+households#p2260507

For example, take a world where there is one household, where I live with my wife and daughter. I own guns, but neither my wife or daughter is interested in doing so. 100% of households in that world possess guns. Let’s say my wife and I get divorced and she moves out to her own home. Now only 50% of households possess guns, even though the number of gun owners is still constant. Say my daughter turns 18 and she moves out on her own to a third house. Only 33% of the households in the world possess guns, even though the number of gun owners (me) is still constant. The fall in per-household gun ownership rates can also be explained by factors like an increase in the number of women-headed single-parent households; statistically, women are much less likely than men to own guns.

I don't think that can explain a 20-point delta in the household ownership rate when that decline has been in concert with a skyrocketing number of actual guns in circulation.

Another way to look at this would be to see if the increase in the number of actual weapons in the U.S. since 1970 has increased at a greater rate than the number of households. There are about 2.5 times as many households in the U.S. than when that survey began; how many more guns are there now? If the increase in the number of guns is close to the same level or higher, I can't see how the data in the survey is misleading.

And I'm not making any sort of claim other than frustration at what I see as low-grade panic among existing gun owners that does little more than drive the cost of guns and ammunition through the roof.

tifosi77 wrote:And I'm not making any sort of claim other than frustration at what I see as low-grade panic among existing gun owners that does little more than drive the cost of guns and ammunition through the roof.

It’s not necessarily unreasonable panic, though. Bad events often lead to bad laws, and Sandy Hook was about as bad as it gets. Anti-gun people tried their best to exploit that tragedy to get new laws and restrictions passed. And while many gun owners in “safe” states can relax at the news that Feinstein’s federal gun and magazine bans are almost certainly dead, others are not so fortunate. For example, it would not be unreasonable for Coloradan gun owners to be out trying to buy up 15+ round magazines right now, as they will shortly be illegal to purchase. And there are plenty of places—like New Jersey, Connecticut, Maryland, Massachusetts, and your state of California—where gun owners can probably expect even more restrictions on what they can own and possess.

Yeah, there are already ten proposals in the works to make CA the most restrictive state in the union. They want to limit (if not ban) the sale of semi-automatic rifles with removable clips, regulate ammunition sales more closely and strengthen rules that block felons and the mentally ill from buying weapons........ they are even trying to put some of scapegoating on Hollywood and the video game industry, despite decades of studies that show absolutely no causal relationship to consuming violent media and committing violent crimes.

That one about felons and cookoos isn't such a big deal, but the proof of the pudding is in the eating and how they aim to accomplish that goal is the tricksy bit.

You have my sincere condolences. Apparently, your idiot governor has woken up to the fact that no one makes seven-round magazines for higher-capacity guns, and no gun company at the moment plans to make seven-round magazines. The proposed solution is of the class of stupidity that can only come from government: people will still be able to buy 10-round magazines, but they will break the law if they load more than seven rounds in them.

DelPen wrote:Come on, they knew exactly what they were doing with the 7 round magazine limit. The whole point is that no one makes them for full size pistols.

Maybe. Then again, they did pass this thing at midnight only a few hours after the bill was written. For example, the drafter also forgot to exempt law enforcement from the law, so unless they amend the statute cops in NY will also be limited to seven-round mags for their new duty guns.

tifosi77 wrote:I thought they amended it to include the law enforcement exemption within a week of the law's passage.

I know they needed to; I must admit I’m not sure if that already happened. Still, it demonstrates there was a certain lack of attention to detail in the mad rush to ram though that law before passions cooled and reason reasserted itself.

As I like to point out, the USA PATRIOT Act was drafted, debated, passed and signed into law 44 days after 9/11. We're still trying to untangle that mess, and like will still be caught up in it when a generation of people who haven't even been born yet are approaching middle age.

i never really had an opinion of it. i think that people show own guns if that is their prerogative. i never had an interest too but now i am very interested to go again and potentially turn it in to a hobby.